Virtual Weapons and International Order

Every historical era begins with a revolution: it comes of
age when revolution becomes the new normal. The Reformation began when a
disaffected Augustinian friar asked, What authority has the Pope? It achieved
its peak when the schism in Christianity became a source not of religious war
but of stable social structures. The Romantic period started with the
philosophical challenge, What is a state if not also an integral nation? It
matured when nationalism in Europe became less a cause of violence than of
political cohesion. The present era, too, can be defined by a revolutionary
question, one rooted in technology: what limits has space? For cyberspace, a
defining motif of our era, smashes the constraints of geography on the speed
and range of human action. Never before has technology permeated society so
completely or influenced the dealings of states and peoples so intricately as
in the present. Yet despite significant experience with the related technology,
the cyber age remains in a revolutionary condition. We have yet to master the
forces of change that define our times.

The
distinguishing feature of revolution is that it challenges not just the
rational but also the moral order. Contemporary observers struggle to make
sense of both sets of problems as they relate to the virtual weapon of
cyberspace – malicious computer code designed to manipulate the functions of
machines or else seize, corrupt, or disclose their sensitive data. This lag in
understanding is especially acute in the study of international relations,
a realm of inquiry whose intellectual fashion is to reject deep change in the
states system as an outcome before it is even conceived as a theoretical premise.

Consider,
first, the shock to the rational order of interstate relations. The virtual
weapon is a recent addition to the arsenal of states, although some nations
already regard it as “an integral part” of their armory. Its meaning for
interstate strategic dealings is difficult to decipher. Only a limited record
of events exists to orient this laborious learning process. The new capability,
moreover, is scientifically complex and highly volatile. Even computer
specialists do not fully grasp its behavioral properties or the consequences of
its use, which may devastate modern society even if they fall below the
traditional criterion of interstate violence on which the conventions of
international law and diplomacy rest. There is also the problem of the
technology’s sheer speed of action. Released from the restrictions of the
physical laws of motion, security crises transpire at a pace (often measurable
in milliseconds) that even seasoned statesmen find difficult to manage.

Second, and
more fundamental, is the disturbance of the moral order. Cyberspace empowers
states whose basic goals – sometimes grounded in a revolutionary domestic
ideology, other times in the perverse visions of despots – are incompatible
with the fundamental purpose of international society: the preservation of a
minimum measure of order and peace. More elementally, the technology also
empowers nontraditional players – proxy militias, political hacktivists,
private corporations, extremist militant groups, and even lone agents – who may
seek to undermine the political order, who may reject or fail to understand the
complex conditions of peace and stability among states co-existing in the
international jungle, and whom the traditional apparatus of diplomacy struggles
to absorb because such players are not recognized state entities. New entrants
onto the international scene who were traditionally barred from geopolitics are
now able to disrupt it, at times decisively, via cyber politics.

Tendencies of
chaos among the new players compound familiar problems of anarchy among the
old: how to stem the development and proliferation of arms, how to tame their
use by an arsenal of rules and norms, how to develop stable expectations of
behavior out of uncertainty – in short, how to impose order upon turmoil. The
sum result of these shocks to the international order is that a cyber conflict
may be difficult to model, regulate, and terminate even among rational
state contenders bent on avoiding it.

Despite the
peculiar features of security in our times, the tendency of international
relations specialists has been to bring the virtual weapon to the rule of
conventional statecraft – to deny the existence of the cyber revolution.
Skeptics invoke that unfailing servant of intellectual reactionism in the field
of international security studies: Carl von Clausewitz. The school of
skepticism takes various forms. It elaborates a paradigm of security and
conflict that continues to prioritize the physical over the virtual world,
interstate violence over sub-threshold conflict, the interests and capabilities
of states over unconventional actors. The temptation of political thinkers has
been to integrate the new technology into familiar doctrines – the laws of
armed conflict, the principles and methods of interstate coercion and conquest,
the machinery and logic of military warfighting. The academic enterprise of
security studies is far behind the times.

The resulting lag in understanding is not for lack of experience with the related technology. Cyberspace is not a recent invention. It emerged and grew in a series of uneven and partly coinciding stages beginning in the first half of the twentieth century. More than seventy years have passed since the advent of computers (one possible starting point of the cyber age); fifty since the invention of the Internet (a truer point of origin); twenty since the explosive global growth of this information skin, which now envelops almost all aspects of society: governmental, financial, social, even military. Two decades have also elapsed since the first significant malware incident – the Morris worm, which in 1988 impaired thousands of computers and led network operators to partition the Internet4 – awoke computer specialists to the technology’s harmful potential (international relations theorists remain in a deep slumber).Whatever point of origin one selects – and the point is debatable – the current cyber age is well past its first generation of contemporaries. Possibly we are its fourth.

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